


Unseen Stars

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Kamet pov, Post-Canon, Post-Thick as Thieves, Religion and mythology, Self-Discovery, Slavery issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 11:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15728772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: ‘I found the Attolian at a small temple by the water. I wasn’t looking for him, but if I have learned anything over the course of the past year it is that my feet are not always mine to command.’A quiet little exploration of Kamet’s state of mind in the days immediately after they leave Attolia.





	Unseen Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Blyth3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blyth3/gifts).



> Title is from this passage by Enoclitus: We think we steer the ship of fate, but all of us are guided by unseen stars.
> 
>  
> 
> Many thanks are in order! To my recipient: your prompts made me wish I was an artist! But I hope that you enjoy this wordy little offering. To my beta, florianschild, once again it was a pleasure to work with you, thank you for your marvelous work. To my friend stardust_made for reading and encouraging and loving these characters as much as I do, even without reading the books! And to the mod, running this thing three years strong, you’re my hero! Be blessed in your endeavors.

I found the Attolian at a small temple by the water. I wasn’t looking for him, but if I have learned anything over the course of the past year it is that my feet are not always mine to command. 

We had set in at a small port on the western end of Cymorene. It was our first stop after leaving the capital city of Attolia and, gods willing, it would be the last for almost a month. I did not miss the chance to marvel at how recently this had been the emperor’s own plan: sail to Cymorene, resupply, carry on. 

It was a far different vessel we found ourselves on this time, neither the shabby riverboat nor the cramped but seaworthy merchant ship. The _Arrow of Ijorn_ was designed for war but outfitted for peace; she carried the ambassadorial correspondence from Attolia to the court of Ferria and to the Braels. Costis and I were just two more faces among a party nearly as eclectic as Roamanj’s caravan.

Given liberty for the remainder of the afternoon, with strict orders to be well aboard before nightfall as we would leave with the pre-dawn tide, those without duties scattered to take in the sights of the tiny town. 

Costis hadn’t spoken a word to me as he turned away from the captain and made his way towards his quarters. Not ten minutes later I happened to catch a glimpse of his back as he strode down the gangplank and was annoyed because I’d been about the debark as well but didn’t want to look as though I was following him. I do not believe that he even saw me there, but such was my pride that I did not want anyone else to think it of me either. I dithered there on the deck for a moment, torn between stubbornness and pride.

‘That which makes us human saves us from divine pretense and for my part I shall celebrate this indivinity.’ 

I do not find it either amusing or helpful when my great memory for quips and phrases is put to work sifting through platitudes to apply to my own person. I knew that bombastic philosopher all too well, however, and could admit that my mind had made no great leap to land on him. 

‘While surrounded by animals driven purely by base instinct we alone display such aberrations of behavior as pridefulness, posturing and pretense. It is the foible and folly which makes it plain that within human nature...’

He did tend to go on, no better in person than in his widely-circulated treatises. I’d stood in the wings of the amphitheater in Ferria once and listened to him while my former master conducted business with one of his spies. This was not long after the incident with Marin, I was still limping, and as I had yet to regain his trust he instructed me to hang back so that I wouldn’t overhear. My eyes were not yet as poor as they have become and I was skilled at lip reading, but instead of attending to their conversation I found myself caught instead by the philosopher’s odd phrase, his call to ‘celebrate this indivinity,’ and in the end directed far more attention to him than his high-blown opinions warranted.

Perhaps I was struck by the idea that our foibles — hubris and fickleness and stubbornness and all the other uniquely human shortcomings — were worthy of celebration.

I was wandering the footpath that lead away from the town gates and along the base of the sea cliff until a sudden bend in the road brought Costis into view. He was sitting on a bench that faced a small temple carved into the living rock of the cliff face. He looked up and saw me at once, saw as well that I had hesitated when I saw him. I forced my feet to continue on their treacherous way, thinking of Sukir and wondering why, when I most wanted to escape from him — even when it was only an hour of solitude that I desired — he was the most easily found.

He moved to one side of the bench in unmistakable invitation, and I sat. The temple was smaller than I’d realized and had probably once been little more than a natural hollow place in the rock, now beautified with columns of carved and painted stone at either side. I had no way of knowing to which god or goddess the temple belonged, but at a guess it was a local favorite; the low altar which stretched nearly the width of it was loaded with dozens of offerings.

Of greater interest to me was the much smaller niche in the rock several feet to its right, where a beautiful ceramic shelf of inlaid mosaic had been carefully affixed. On it stood a small but finely-carved statue of Shesmegah. I swallowed hard and had to blink rapidly several times to clear my vision. Somehow both startling and comforting, I had to wonder how she had come to be here. Cymorene is one of those islands that has changed hands more times than history remembers and has been home to many peoples and gods, but after a moment of awed reflection my spirits settled with a bump and I thought sourly that it was just as likely that she had been placed here by one of the Mede agents who had stood poised to overthrow Attolia as by any more humble supplicant.

She did not have many offerings on her altar. There was a miniature golden drinking cup, however, shining at her feet, decorated with a single small gem that caught and held the sun’s slanting rays. I squinted at it, then turned again to look at the Attolian altar. My eyes had not deceived me; another cup, its twin, rested there as well. Something about their placement made them look like recent additions and not merely because they were by far the most valuable of the offerings but had not yet been removed by acolyte or thief. I wondered if they were from Costis. Once I might have asked him, but we had not regained the easy camaraderie that had sustained us in our first long journey together and that had allowed him to ask me once if I had always been a slave. I had begun to wonder if that camaraderie, like every other aspect of that journey, had been grounded in deception.

When Costis broke the silence, I realised that I did not have any idea how long the two of us had sat there without speaking a word.

“I have been thinking about my king.”

Of course he had. His king had upended both of our lives; it would have been stranger by far to hear that Costis had _not_ been thinking about him. 

“Did you know that he was almost assassinated in the royal garden last year?” I did know. Costis glanced at my face and nodded, adding, “I was there when it happened.”

I turned to look at him. “You fought the assassins?”

“That is exactly what everyone else in the court assumed.” Costis’s voice was flat but I knew what his tone concealed: an old injury, one that stubbornly refused to heal. “No. I didn’t need to. He fought them off himself.”

“He goes armed through his own palace?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

“He took the sword off one assassin and killed him with it, and the other. The third...did you know that his hook is edged like a knife?” I shook my head mutely, and from the corner of my eye I saw Costis doing the same. “I don’t think anybody did.”

I cleared my throat, and when I spoke it was a reminder of why I should never try to be glib: “Nahuseresh certainly didn’t; otherwise, he would have given Sounis the money for more than three assassins.”

Beside me, Costis went still and I allowed myself only a moment to imagine that other world. That world where ten, a dozen, assassins had been sent to end the King of Attolia, and succeeded in dispatching his favorite lieutenant as well. I could not suppress a shudder and as if in answer, Costis shook himself and succeeded in speaking lightly where I had failed.

“That is not what I was thinking of. Well, it’s the start of it: afterwards, it came to the king’s attention that when I was in fear for his life I promised ten gold cups on Philia’s altar, if she would keep him safe.”

“Ah,” I said, comprehension dawning. I knew of Philia, she was the Attolian goddess of mercy, and this was surely her temple. In a melting pot such as this port town on a contested island, it made a lovely kind of sense that Shesmegah should be here as well. Neighbors; not rivals but sisters.

The Attolian still wasn’t finished. “The king knew that I could never personally repay the debt, and so he paid for the cups from the palace treasury. I took them to the temple on the acropolis myself. I explained the odd circumstances and the priestesses said that it was all in order.” He grew thoughtful, stretching his legs out in front of him and looking down at his boots. I wondered how Eugenides had come by his knowledge. If I know Costis at all I am certain that he would no more have told the king himself than asked his assistance in satisfying the debt. 

“The cups were like nothing I’d ever seen. Certainly nothing like the plain gold with simple carved figures that I’d envisioned. These were half again larger than the usual ceremonial cups, and so crusted with gems you could barely see the shape of the cup beneath, like barnacles on a ship’s hull. At first I thought it was just that money means nothing to him, to a king I mean. Then I began to wonder if he was mocking me.”

I thought of the errand boy I’d known, coaxing Brinna to allow him a sweet as a reward for some favor he’d done her — the favor being that he’d actually done his duty instead of shirking it for once — smiling wide-eyed at her and saying, ‘Just one sweet, Brinna, only one, who’ll notice!’ before prancing away with the largest and most painstakingly-decorated of the fruit tarts destined for her majesty’s own breakfast table. 

“So you leave miniature cups at Philia’s altar now, despite that your promise has been fulfilled?”

“Yes.”

“And at the altars of other goddesses, as well?” I asked, distantly aware that I was amused to discover this about him, but that voice was quiet in the background of my relief that he was speaking to me so openly.

“No. I mean, yes, but this was the first time.” He rubbed his forehead, and when he spoke again his thoughts seemed to have skipped several steps ahead, and I could not at first follow them. “I have never seen so much money in one place as what the king gave me for this journey. I have my life because he gave it to me. And because of you, of course,” he added, so casually that my heart nearly missed the words, “because you came back for me in Zaboar. Still, I don’t know what possessed me to buy two cups in the market, earlier. I can afford them, yes, but why two at once...” He shook his head. “When I saw the second altar...I did not think that she would mind. Philia, I mean. I don’t know who that is.”

“That is Shesmegah,” I told him.

After a beat, he turned to look at me with wide eyes and in a voice filled with wonder, asked, “Shesmegah? The Medean goddess of mercy?”

I felt obligated to correct him. “She long predates the Mede empire, but yes. That is she.” After a moment I ducked my head, clearing my throat. “I had not expected ever to see her likeness again in my life.”

Costis was silent for a long moment, then I heard him release his breath in a wry huff of a laugh. “And that is why I was thinking about my king. When I told him that the cups were to be dedicated to Philia, and not one of his Eddisian gods, he said, ‘It is good to curry favor where you can. You never know who might save you when you overreach.’” Costis sighed through his nose, and added in a murmur, “My king has told me that it’s my own fault that I am continually used for a tool. He says that if he can look at my face and know me, how much better might the gods, who can look into my heart...”

He had his hands clasped between his knees and was looking down at them, as though fascinated by the play of light and shadow over his interlaced fingers. 

“Costis, I am sorry.”

He looked up at me, surprised, but when he asked, “For what, Kamet?” I knew that he was asking a genuine question, not dismissing the long-overdue apology. 

When we’d traveled together before, he’d seemed able to read my thoughts. Now, he either could not, or he did not trust himself and wanted to hear from my own lips an explanation for why my behavior towards him had been so...uneven.

I had been so very glad to see him when he appeared so unexpectedly at the start of this second journey, and as unreserved in telling him so as my nature would allow. Moments before I caught sight of him that day, I had been wishing for the chance to apologize to him for what I thought of as my abuse of his better nature in deceiving him for all those many weeks. 

That evening, sitting alone on the foredeck watching the lights of the ship glinting off the crests of the waves all around us, I had said to him, ‘When I thought that I would leave Attolia without seeing you again, I very much regretted the idea that for the rest of your life you would think of me as nothing but a liar, an imposter.’ It had been the truth, but it had still not been an apology. 

Several days later, during our first serious foray into a discussion of our adventures, I’d made some allusion to a time I’d misdirected him and he replied, ‘You mean when you lied to me?’ In return, I had snapped at him. What exactly I said I am not certain. What I am certain of, with the dispassionate assistance of hindsight, is that Costis’s voice, in making the jibe, had been entirely light-hearted.

“I have been thinking of Marin,” I blurted the words out as silence threatened to stretch on until it would be time to rejoin the ship. I glanced at him and then back to the statue of Shesmegah, and knew that my words were true, if unpremeditated, and hardly an answer to his earlier question. “Do you remember what I told you about her?”

Costis seemed ready to follow my misdirection yet again. “You told me that she had loved you, but also loved Nahuseresh.”

“Yes,” I ducked my head, picking at the blister on my thumb. In our days of traveling together my hands had become rough from a different sort of labor than I’d ever known, while I’d lost the familiar calluses of pen and penknife. I was gaining those back now with interest; I’d been making progress on my narrative for Relius, finding it easier than I’d expected to recall the specifics of our travel, sometimes writing all night without stopping as though I’d become a conduit; as though I was not myself generating the words so much as allowing them to flow through me. Perhaps that’s why I’d been so fixated on our past interactions; unable to put aside exchanges that ought to have been inconsequential.

“I told you that she was beautiful in spirit,” I went on. “Like Shesmegah.” A hum from beside me told me that he remembered. “I’ve been thinking about that. About why I said that, what possessed me to claim such a likeness. I’d never said anything like it before, never even to myself.”

“Surely Shesmegah would not object to the comparison?” Costis asked. “Not when she used to be mortal herself?”

I stared at him. Half a year ago he hadn’t known who Shesmegah was.

He cleared his throat lightly. “‘Wise Immakuk you ask my aid, but who am I against great Tenep, I who was once as mortal as you?’”

It took me a moment to realise that he was quoting — and very nearly quoting correctly — from the story of Ennikar and the witch of Urkull. He flushed under my gaze and averted his eyes.

“I thought that Shesmegah said that, or something like it. When Immakuk asks her for help in saving Ennikar. Never mind.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “You’re right. I...had not thought of it that way.”

When I glanced at Costis I saw that he was examining something that he held between his fingers. It caught the light and made me think of the small coin I carried in an inside pocket of the tunic that the king’s own tailors had made for me.

He spoke again after half a minute. “What I remember better is that you told me that Marin could find something to love in everyone.”

That was true enough. I couldn’t understand what Costis meant by speaking it in that tone, as though he thought that what he said was making a point. I looked at him and he raised his eyebrows, prompting me. “And so, you loved someone who could have loved _anyone_?”

“Ah.” I blinked and looked away from him. 

Poor Costis. How much had he suffered on my behalf already, the deception and the miles and the hardships? And now, to leave the only life and the only home he has ever known to carry on his king’s service in the company of one who constantly and consistently underestimates him.

“If you think me poor company, Costis, it is no worse than I think of myself.”

“What?” I had startled him. “No, that is not what I was saying.”

“No, I know that. I only meant that I have not given you much by reason to think well of me. You are right, of course, about Marin. She loved everyone. Therefore, as I was not singled out for such affection, neither could I be unworthy of receiving it. Or think ill of her for bestowing it.”

I had, in counterpoint, been singled out by my master. My master, to whom I was more important — more valuable, as Costis would say — than a beautiful dancing girl no matter what physical pleasure he took from her. Nahuseresh had chosen me over Marin. It was, at the time, the height of what I could hope to achieve for myself, that place in my master’s regard, and I had worked tirelessly to keep and hold that place for myself.

“You are vain,” Costis said into the silence. His tone softened the words, made them sound almost like a question. “But you do not expect to be valued, except by those who can make use of you.”

I felt him looking at me, but I could not tear my gaze away from Shesmegah. “I was a slave for a very long time.”

He made a sound I could not interpret and I found myself meeting his eyes just as he asked, “Do you think ill of me? For throwing in my lot with you?”

“Your king—”

“Did not command me to be here.”

Eugenides and his ‘suggestions.’

“Is that why you’ve been upset with me? You think me an idiot for wanting to come with you, for being stubborn enough, or stupid enough, to go on valuing you as my friend?”

What he saw in my face I could not begin to say, only that after looking at me for a moment he snorted and shook his head, his lips twitching as he faced forward again. He rolled his shoulders, stretching his arms towards the sky as though stiff from sitting. “ _You_ are the idiot, Kamet. But I don’t mind.”

“Well,” I said, and felt myself beginning to smile. “As long as _you_ don’t mind, Costis, I am sure all will be well.”

Costis stood, then offered his hand and I took it. When we were both standing we turned together to look down towards the coast. The last rays of bright sunlight were slanting into the water, catching the waves and dazzling my eyes. It would be a beautiful sunset, already hinting at a brilliant red just waiting for full twilight to break free across the sky. 

I turned to walk back down the path toward the harbor, but Costis stopped at Shesmegah’s altar, looking thoughtful. Once again I saw him fidgeting with something in his hand and this time could see that it was indeed a coin, a gold stater with the lilies of Attolia on one side, and I was struck with a flash of insight that might as well have been called ‘inspiration’ for all I could explain how I came by it: that single coin was the change he’d received after paying for the two gold cups. 

Weighing the coin in his palm, I heard him say pensively, “Until Shesmegah in her pity for Wise Immakuk turned his path, turned it to Ennikar.”

Turning away from the altar, he smiled at me. The coin winked in the setting sun from its place beside the cup at the beloved goddess’s feet.

I slipped my hand inside my tunic and brought out Eugenides’s coin. By rights I could have called it ‘my coin,’ but in holding it for so long Eugenides had transformed it into something else, something far weightier than a simple favor passed between friends. I had no words for the occasion and so merely left it on Philia’s altar with a bow, hoping that my silent gratitude would be enough.

As we began once more to walk away, I felt lighter than I had in months. 

We hadn’t gone more than a dozen paces before Costis’s stomach rumbled. He looked sheepish and rubbed his belly, explaining almost meekly that he’d spent all the coin he’d brought ashore on the cups and hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.

“Let’s go then,” I said, nodding towards the forest of bobbing masts just coming into view. “I am sure that our fine galleymen will have something to offer a supplicant as humble and as hungry as you.”

He laughed and slung an arm around my shoulders as we made our way back to the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoy my writing, I'd be thrilled if you'd take a minute to check out my original fiction. My first novel, 'Portrait of a Stranger,' is a sweet story of three chance encounters, two boys, and first love. Co-written with my fic-writing partner stardust_made, it will be released on December 26, 2018. You can order it [HERE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KVLWHF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1543166018&sr=1-1&keywords=Portrait+of+a+Stranger).
> 
> The first few chapters are available to read [here on our blog](https://leboncanon.wordpress.com/). We appreciate the support of our fellow fanpeople!


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